alt Hacker News> You get to decide how people see you. Hair, clothes, body language, smile, is 90% of how people decide whether they want to interact with you.
I see what you're getting at, but also this take kinda annoys me because it falls into the bucket of implying a personal fault. If people don't socialise with you then it must be because you do or don't do X, Y, Z. "Just do X" and you'll become a social butterfly.
Based on my personal experience, I don't know if I buy it. I guess I'm a regular enough guy, but seriously almost never, across my whole life, does someone invoke random socialisation with me. Yet I know people who can't even take the bus without strangers striking up conversations and hassling them, while they are actively trying to be antisocial. What magic trick are these people performing? Can I learn the same trick? What if I don't want to perform it? I think the reality is that for some (many?) people, it just doesn't work out and it's not necessarily due to any particular flaw.
As someone who both experienced phases in life where no one approached me and phases were I get approached regularly, it's a mix of external signifiers and some internal woo stuff that people don't really understand conciously. Or said another way, when someone says you have to "look approachable" what they actually mean is that a) you have to present yourself externally in a way that makes people more likely to engage you (the aforementioned hair, clothes etc.) and b) you have to internally be open to the world (which is what dictates your body language in subtle ways that apparently get picked up). The issue is when someone says something like "have an open body language" is that it's impossible to 24/7 fake a certain type of body language, you actually have to believe it.
If you are naturally a distrusting person people will pick up on it, just how people will pick up if you're naturallly an open person. (The true trick is realizing that "naturally" can be changed)